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User blog:RJ Long/Forewords and Backwards
The following is the Foreword from the fifth edition of the Commodore Products Source List, published in May 1996. Last year at about this time (May 1995), the assets of Commodore Business Machines was bought by Escom AG of Germany who primarily wanted the name "Commodore" to help them expand their market in Europe. A limited number of brand names can do business there. Prior to the actual sale, Escom learned of a neat computer named Amiga which they would be getting as part of Commodore’s holdings. They liked it so much they started a whole new company: Amiga Technologies. The parent company, Escom, could then concentrate on their IBM-compatible line of computers, using the Commodore name. Amiga Technologies probably did more between June 1995 and February 1996 than the mis-management of Commodore did in its last three or four years: press conferences, making more Amiga 1200s and 4000Ts, computer fairs, Internet software, a new Amiga (the Walker), and announcing the use of the PowerPC series of processors in the 1997 Amigas. During that time, it was hoped that the C64 and C128 could be reintroduced. There were plans to continue selling them in Europe and to start selling them in China. Neither one materialized. The only news of significance has been that Activision licensed the C64 ROMs so that one of their "nostalgia" packs of games could be made more easily. Recently, the market for IBM-compatibles has declined. There's a glut of product and fewer buyers. This has affected Escom as well, and they've decided to sell Amiga Technologies. The likely buyer is VIScorp of Chicago, though a newly-formed company named PIOS may complicate that. VIScorp has some of the people that helped design the original Amiga and seems to want to continue the Amiga's rebirth. added August 1997: VIScorp wound up complicating their own deal: they didn't offer a lot of cash, mostly stock. The deal fell through when they couldn't make any payments. QuikPak made an offer in February 1997, but Gateway 2000 snuck up on everyone and bought the Amiga in March. So, what does this mean to us, the C64 and C128 owners? Most likely nothing. Even without a company making new machines, there are more new, really neat items being made today. We can now run 28.8K modems (up to 57.6K, actually), send and receive faxes and scan in documents via the fax, put in a gigabyte hard drive, and outrun a 386-equipped IBM-compatible with the Super64 CPU 20 MHz accelerator by Creative Micro Designs. Want more? The Internet is waiting. - - - Exploring the Internet is part of what I've been doing lately, and is part of the reason why this list got delayed two months. The other part is I'm also the editor for an Amiga club now. It's turned out to be even more work than I had anticipated. The Internet is immense. Just trying to keep up with the newsgroups can eat up several hours a day, especially when your news server keeps marking yesterday's messages as unread. But, it also can help immensely. I was able to gather information for this List via E-mail and from the World Wide Web (noted as "Web page" in the key.) If I can get your help in notifying me of new C64-supporting clubs and places, as well as letting me know when they shut down, we should be able to turn this web site into an excellent place to turn to for current information. Category:Pastwords Category:Blog posts